Description
Book SynopsisResearch and theorizing on criminal decision making has not kept pace with recent developments in other fields of human decision making. Whereas criminal decision making theory is still largely dominated by cognitive approaches such as rational choice-based models, psychologists, behavioral economists and neuroscientists have found affect (i.e., emotions, moods) and visceral factors such as sexual arousal and drug craving, to play a fundamental role in human decision processes.
This book examines alternative approaches to incorporating affect into criminal decision making and testing its influence on such decisions. In so doing it generalizes extant cognitive theories of criminal decision making by incorporating affect into the decision process. In two conceptual and ten empirical chapters it is carefully argued how affect influences criminal decisions alongside rational and cognitive considerations. The empirical studies use a wide variety of methods ranging fro
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"Personally, the editors (and contributors) convinced me of the critical importance of this field in criminology."
Benoit Leclerc, PhD, Senior Lecturer, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University
This collection of papers is a timely and important contribution to our understanding of criminal decision making. It extends the utility of rational choice theory, and enhances its potential for further practical application.
Professor Max Taylor, University of St Andrews
Some while ago I called for researchers in situational crime prevention to ‘make offenders richer’, in the sense of adding emotional and motivational depth to the two-dimensional Rational Choice model, valuable though that has been and will continue to be. Understanding the whole person of the offender – by incorporating affect – can both sharpen and widen our options in designing situational interventions, and suggest new interventions that we have not yet envisaged. The authors of this book have enriched the offender indeed, and in so doing have enriched crime science and criminology in a seminal collection of papers that will stimulate research, theory and practice for years to come.
Paul Ekblom, Professor of Design Against Crime, University of the Arts London
This book makes a unique contribution to the offender decision making literature. Examined in the chapters are the implications of recent developments in emotion research for our understanding of how offenders make decisions. These insights will enhance our knowledge of offending and crime prevention.
Professor Anna Stewart, Griffith University, Australia
Table of Contents1. Introduction Affect and Cognition in Criminal Decision Making: Between Rational Choices and Lapses of Self-Control, 2. Affect and the Reasoning Criminal: Past and Future, 3. Affect and the Dynamic Foreground of Predatory Street Crime: Desperation, Anger, and Fear, 4. Posterior Gains and Immediate Pains: Offender Emotions Before, During and After Robberies, 5. The Role of Sexual Arousal and Perceived Consequences in Men’s and Women’s Decisions to Engage in Sexually Coercive Behaviors, 6. Sexual Arousal and the Ability to Access Sexually Aggressive Consequences from Memory, 7. Emotional Arousal and Child Sex Offending: A Situational Perspective, 8. "I Would Have Been Sorry": Anticipated Regret and the Role of Expected Emotions in the Decision to Offend, 9. Anticipated Emotions and Immediate Affect in Criminal Decision Making: From Shame to Anger, 10. Emotional Justifications for Unethical Behavior, 11. A Neuropsychological Test of Criminal Decision Making: Regional Prefrontal Influences in a Dual Process Model, 12. Traits and States of Self-Conscious Emotions in Criminal Decision Making.
